Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From J. Scott Carpenter

In a Policy Watch of The Washington Institute that ran today, I reflect on yet another Bush Administration initiative that has been left to crawl forward weakly without sustained U.S. leadership: the G-8’s Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) Initiative. Like a man dying of thirst in a hot desert, it won’t have to crawl much farther.

Back in the distant past—four years ago—the Initiative was something the Administration just had to have: a multi-lateral framework that would work to create and support a common reform agenda for the Broader Middle East. It was novel in many ways, and a re-read of its founding documents makes interesting reading, if you’re into that sort of stuff. Its chief innovation was to involve business and civil society actors in the deliberations with governments and ask them to help inform reform priorities. For some groups, it is their only chance to meet face to face with their governments at any level.

For five years now an ever-expanding network of activists and reformers has been meeting and making recommendations to their governments on a whole slew of topics. Policy recommendations have flooded into capitals on everything from vocational training and media reform to election monitoring and women’s empowerment. Annually the groups come together at something clumsily called the Parallel Forum at the Forum for the Future, to summarize their recent meetings and to finalize a set of recommendations to make to ministers when they meet one or two days later. In 2005 in Rabat there were just five such activists, all of whom were hard-core human rights activists. Today in Dubai, there are hundreds representing hundreds more in all sectors.

Over the course of the past two days I’ve been listening in on their conversations and deliberations as an invited delegate at this year’s gathering, and have a number of quick impressions to share.

First, these folks are seriously interested in partnering with governments to stimulate change. These are not wild-eyed revolutionaries of either the secular or the Islamist sort. They are people who want to see their governments and their societies thrive. Not because the United States or anyone else wants them to but because they believe it profoundly themselves. They recognize the failings of their governments but they also fear militant Islam and believe they can help compete with it, if governments would only let them.

Second, and this should encourage Michelle Dunne, they all still want to have elections. When I walked into a discussion on how to improve election monitoring, I asked with shocked incredulity if they were still hoping for and encouraging elections. They looked at me strangely and said of course. Elections are poorly run in this part of the world but they do take place and they should be freer and fairer they said. I agree with them.

The other big take-away from this meeting is that governments—aside from bits of our own—don’t care about this process. No government officials were allowed by the UAE government to participate in this year’s sessions, a sharp break with past practice that allowed government observers. So there was no one to hear the delegates offer constructive criticisms, truly thoughtful ideas or truly bad ones. Moreover, the Emirati government is thinking of curtailing civil society participation at the ministerial altogether, a huge step backwards if it happens. Typically, elected delegations from the parallel session and various meetings that take place over the course of a year make short presentations at the Forum. Apart from Rabat where the NGOs were inadvertently kicked out of the session by the foreign minister (they were later brought back in after the FM called them on their cell phones to apologize) and in Bahrain, where a member of a local human rights organization was not allowed to participate despite having been selected, an ever-larger group of civil society activists has been allowed in the room for the entire ministerial.

So why the change? In part it has to do with the fact that in the Emirates there is no real civil society and so they are unaccustomed to having to deal with it. But in part it also has to do with Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s last minute announcement that she’s not coming to the Forum. Again. The government is clearly embarrassed that she would cancel, knowing that others will now downgrade their participation. Why should they risk being embarrassed further by activists who just might say or do anything? Or perhaps they are trying to force the activists to protest the event giving them a pre-text to cancel it altogether?Last year after Secretary Rice canceled her trip the Yemeni government canceled the Forum—without a pretext.

What is strangely encouraging about all of this is what I heard most of all from the delegates with whom I spoke. They are frustrated the G-8 is not taking the process seriously enough and upset at their own governments’ blindness to the hand that’s being offered, but they want the process to continue. As one of them put it to me, “It’s arrogant and even outrageous that the G-8 would invent this initiative and then abandon it but I hope we can continue to have this sort of meeting. Even without ministers. What do foreign ministers know about privatization or election law anyway? If we could routinely have senior officials from relevant ministries dialogue with us it would be a huge step forward.”

It’s not a whole lot to ask, frankly. But unless attitudes towards the initiative change within the G-8 and the governments of the region, even that may be a bridge too far. Fairly diversified funding for the initiative has all but dried up and most activities are supported now by the United States. With the next Administration even that slim trickle of support could dry up and then the BMENA Initiative would be yet another quickly forgotten grand scheme.

As I write in my piece today, no one will likely mourn its passing, but it truly was a missed opportunity. It occurred to me after reading Tamara Cofman Wittes’s post that this would be one way of partnering with the countries of the region and representatives of their societies to challenge the revisionists of Iran and their proxies. By seriously addressing reform issues and perhaps adding security to the mix, a broad consensus and partnership could emerge to confront the extremist narrative. But it’s late here in Dubai and I’m jet-lagged out of my mind. Perhaps I’m already dreaming.